I guess you could call me hardcore. Cataclysm came out December 7th and I was 85 on December 8th. Before the first week was up I had already gotten some epics through reputations, gotten a ton of gear from heroics, and leveled up both my professions to 525. I ask myself though how hardcore do I want to be. I know my ability. I make a good tank because I can multi task. I make a good leader, explain things well, have good control in fights, can maintain threat, positioning, and adjust quickly as the fight changes. I do think about the game a lot when I am not playing , but right now I'm not thinking all good thoughts.
World of Warcraft is a social game. It can be amazing when you get together with other people and things turn out real well but at the same time the opposite is true. Lately, playing with certain people has lead to more frustrations then enjoyment. The LFD tool is great. It lets people get together and tackle heroics but it was introduced at a time when running dungeons was a joke. The entire group can be held together with 1 or 2 competent people and everyone else was along for the ride. Now that gear has reset and we are not as powerful as we once were, we have to rely on the entire group to be able to defeat encounters.
This is where my frustrations are. I have been increasing my friends list with people that I know are competent. I try to run with them whenever possible. We will all get together on vent and we mark targets, crowd control, and use our abilities to make the encounters easier. The thing is I don't always have people online when I want to run a heroic and that is where I have to rely on the pick up group. I would have to say the likelihood of getting into a group that has the capability of getting to and defeating the last boss is about 30%.
The first pull will tell you a lot about how the group is going to function. To many times I will get a group that has no CC. A warrior, death knight, and a druid will be my dps and I am limited to root which wont do much when I have caster mobs. Then you have the people who refuse to interrupt. They probably don't even have it on their bars. People will listen though. They will dps skull first usually, will crowd control when asked, try to use some of their non-dps abilities. The problem is they don't really react fast enough. If a cc breaks they won't even notice. A spell starts getting cast and they wont interrupt. They don't notice when whirlwind is happening or there is fire on the ground. People are stuck in tunnel mode once the fight starts unless they are looking for something. We were doing the third boss of Grim Batol last night and a boomkin druid and holy priest just refused to get behind the boss when he did his 180 degree arcane breath.
Communication is key when doing heroics and when I explain to the group what to expect it increases our chances but doesn't mean success. I have been lucky with drops and have gotten to the point where there are no tanking upgrades left in heroics. The only thing left for me is to get my 70 valor points a day. I click on the LFD tool but don't always que up knowing that I might waste over an hour of time and not come out successful.
Then their is raiding. For as hard as heroics are, raiding is on a different scale altogether. Outside of Baradin hold, the other raids are extremely punishing. There are just to many abilities that the boss does that punish you if you ever mess up. I know I am more then ready for the raids but the people I run with are not decked out as well as I am. I can't really blame them because we have only been in Cataclysm for less then 3 weeks. My server, Thunderhorn, just doesn't have a good hardcore raiding community. The one guild that was in front as far of progression split up due to drama. We have been pugging a couple of spots for our raids and while the people we recruit are good, we haven't been able to make headway into raiding.
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